


Tetrachromacy

by listlessness



Category: The Umbrella Academy (TV)
Genre: (for you american english folk), Adoptive sibling incest, Apocalypse averted, M/M, Present Tense, Pseudo-Incest, Reginald Hargreeves' A+ Parenting, Soulmate AU, colorblind au, colourblind au, hella fluff
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-05-19
Updated: 2019-05-19
Packaged: 2020-03-07 22:28:11
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 5,952
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/18882499
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/listlessness/pseuds/listlessness
Summary: Although the concept of soulmates has long been dismissed as a fantastical ideal, there's a definite agreement among the scientific community that humans are only capable of seeing colour after experiencing an intense emotional arousal - like falling in love.That's of no help to Klaus, though, as he's been able to see colour all his life.





	Tetrachromacy

**Author's Note:**

> I'm not sure what it is about this show, but it makes me want to write nothing but fluff.

Klaus has never known any different. His world has always been vibrant and rich. There has never been anyway to describe it, and as a child he never needed to. Everything simply _was_. There was never any reason to question it, though he did wonder. 

Things could be described in broad strokes. Vanya's hair is dark, Luther's is light. Their suits are the same as the night, the walls of their bedrooms are bright. Klaus accepts this as readily as he does their designations, Numbers One Two and Three, and Five, Six, and Seven and he, somewhere in the middle of it all. He accepts it because he knows no different. He never wonders as to whether anyone sees their world any differently to himself. 

At three, he begins to realise that not everyone else sees his friends. The children who sit with him on the floor of the nursery that definitely aren't his siblings, the woman who hugs him and whispers in German in his ear, her skirt sticky with blood. At four, he begins to fear them, just as his siblings do. At five, he shrieks and runs in the opposite direction when he sees them. 

Anything he sees beyond that is forgotten. 

Their father teaches them to hone their skills. He shows them how to tie knots, how to staunch a wound, how to run and hide and, later, to run and fight. Their nannies teach them math and how to write, how to thread a needle and boil water. 

Nobody explains to Klaus what else he can see, beyond the dead. He never questions it, never needs to seek an answer. Things continue on without anyone raising it. Ben likes the dark apples and Diego likes the light apples. Sometimes Klaus picks both apples up and compares them, trying to find the right words to describe their differences. The dark one has four ridges on the bottom, the light one has three. The dark one is taller, the light one rounder. The dark is sweet, the light is tart. But words soon fail and he develops a headache and the ghosts start screeching and he has to distract himself. 

Until Grace. 

She is pretty. She smiles, unlike their father, unlike the other nannies. She says they can call her Mom, and they all do, in time. Klaus decides he loves her. 

'I love you, too,' she says, squeezing his shoulder. 'I love all my children equally.' 

'But I love you the most.' 

Diego sticks his tongue out at him for that. 

She doesn't have a bedroom like they all do. But she has a small walk-in closet where she keeps her clothes and make up and shoes. It's Klaus' favourite room. It's full of interesting items. Klaus likes to rifle through her clothes and hold them up against his body in the small dresser mirror. They're too big, but that's not why Klaus does it. He likes to see how they look. The different shades of light and dark, how they make his skin look different. He tries to compare them to his hair, his eyes. 

Mom has make up. Nobody has make up, not even Allison, despite how much she begs and pleads. Klaus has spied on Mom and seen how she puts it on. It's harder than he looks, and he pokes himself in the eye. It wells up with tears and turns a funny shade and she finds him, rubbing it and staring at it in the mirror. 

'Are you hurt?' she asks. 

And Klaus says, 'no', and it's not a lie, not really. But he keeps rubbing it and looking in the mirror, and watching how his eye looks different. 

'Why does it do that?' he asks, poking the puffy skin. 

'Because it's protecting your eye and keeping it safe,' Mom explains. 

It's not the answer Klaus is looking for. He knows biologically why it does that, their dad has taught them. His eye is watering to clear out the dirt and germs. It's swelling up because that's what eyes do when they're hurt. But something about his eye is different. It looks darker compared to his other eye. The part around his iris is different. But Grace is leading him out to the bathroom to flush his eye out, and he doesn't have a chance to ask any more. 

She catches him back in her closet two weeks later. He's sitting under her dresses and skirts, looking up at them all. His favourite is the one with the big, dark spots. Holding it in his hands, he fans the skirt out and looks it over. 

Grace kneels down beside him. She's wearing a dress covered in lots of tiny flowers. It's a nice dress, but it's not the skirt. 

'What are you doing, sweetie?' 

Klaus looks at her and then back at the skirt. He grins, gap-toothed because Luther knocked him over in training the day before and he lost a wobbly tooth. 

'I love this one the most,' he says, and presses his face into it. It smells like the perfume she wears. 

'Why?' 

'It's my favourite.' 

'Why?' 

Klaus frowns. Mom never asks questions like that unless she's trying to get _them_ to think why. Allison says it's a trick. 

'Because... it's soft,' he finally says. 

It _is_ soft. It's a little squishy. But it's not just the fabric that's soft. It's a light skirt, but not like the shirt she is currently wearing. It matches her shoes. She has other skirts the same kind of light colour. Some of the flowers on the dress she's wearing is the same kind of lightness. It's a soft light. 

'What about this skirt?' she asks, and points to another skirt. 

It's a dark skirt. It's a rich dark, like the dark eggplants she sometimes makes them eat. Klaus wrinkles his nose up a little bit. 

She points to another one. It's a light one, like her dress and some blouses she wears. He shrugs. Similar, but not the same. 

'This is my favourite,' he insists, and hugs the hem. 

'Does it look like this?' she asks, as she stands and pulls out a dress. 

It's a dress that's the same soft-light as the skirt. There fabric is thick, and Klaus can see the grain of the thread. It's not as flouncy and fluffy as the polka dotted skirt, but it's the same pretty shade. He nods and runs his hands over it. 

'It's the same as that,' he says, pointing at one of the flowers on Grace's skirt. Then he points to a pair of shoes. 'And that.' 

'It's pink,' Grace says. 

Klaus looks at her, then back at the skirt. Confused, he furrows his brow and tries to rationalise what she's saying. She points at his favourite skirt again. 

'Pink.' 

'Pink,' he repeats. 

She points to her dress. 'Blue.' 

'Blue.' 

'Purple,' is next, with her pointing to the skirt that looks like an eggplant. 

'Purple,' Klaus echoes. 

It takes him a moment to understand what she's talking about. He knows what different items of clothing are called, he knows they're not speaking another language. But the words are strange, and he sounds them all out in his mouth. Pink, blue, purple. Red, orange, green. 

'They're called colours,' she says, her voice quiet. 

Colours. Klaus likes that. He loves colours. He loves the yellow of Mom's hair, and he loves the green of his eyes. He loves her red lipstick and pink blush. He loves the soft white of clouds in the pale blue sky, and he loves the orange flowers that grow along the brown brick wall. His eyes widen as he learns all their names, picking things up and demanding he tell her what they all mean. 

'How long have you been able to see colour, Klaus?' she asks him gently as he paints his lips with a tube of lipstick labelled _Fire and Ice_. 

He shrugs. 'Forever.' 

It _has_ been forever. Klaus has never known any different. He smiles at her, lipstick on his teeth, and laughs as she wipes it off. 

She explains to him in quiet tones that he needs to keep it a secret. It's not a _bad_ secret, she says, stressing the point. Reginald has been very strict on what a _bad_ secret is. But not everyone can see colour, and his siblings might get upset if they find out. Klaus frowns at that, screwing his face up. His siblings get jealous over lots of things, like who gets the last egg, or who sits at the front of the helicopter, or who gets to jump on the pommel horse first. But this is a funny thing to get jealous about, because this is _seeing_ things. 

'Only grown ups are meant to see colour, Klaus. This makes you very special.' 

'More special than Diego?' 

'Special in a different way,' she says, gently. 'And your father won't like it.' 

Klaus still doesn't understand. But he loves his mom and he likes having a secret power that his siblings don't know about. When he's older, Grace says, he'll understand. But older is a long time away to a six-year-old boy, and all that matters right then is that she lets him keep a tube of the _Fire and Ice_ lipstick. 

* 

It becomes easier to keep his secret as he grows older. Klaus still wonders why he can see colour when no one else can, but he doesn't ever dare to bring it up. None of his siblings seem to even realise there's a whole world they're not privy to. They're not permitted to watch much television beyond the news, and their father never brings it up. Sometimes Klaus tries to ask Mom more about it, but she only ever smiles and dodges the question. 

He knows better than to ask Pogo. Common consensus among the siblings is that Pogo has powers of his own and can see things that aren't really there. 

Ben is the first to realise something is different about how they perceive the world. The television may be out of bounds, but they're allowed access to world outside their own through the written world. He's a ravenous reader, and he pulls books off the shelf and dumps them all in a pile in front of them during lunch. They're thirteen now, and their father has begun to loosen his noose-like grip on them. They're now granted a full twenty minutes of unsupervised interaction. 

_Anne of Green Gables_. 

_The Scarlet Letter_. 

_The Colour Purple_. 

_White Oleander_. 

Klaus knows all these words. The green of Luther's shirt, the scarlet of Allison's hair tie. The purple of Five's tie, the white of Vanya's headband. 

Holding his breath, he picks up one of the novels. _The Gold Bug_. His eyes lift to Diego sitting opposite him, a golden hoop in his ear where Klaus had stuck a needle through it the day before. Their father has yet to see it. 

'He's never taught us these words,' Ben says, waving one of the books. 

'He hasn't taught us quantum physics, either, but that doesn't mean it doesn't exist,' Five drawls. 

'Quantum physics is a _theory_ ,' Vanya argues. 

'What is _green_?' Ben says, poking the title. 'I don't think green is a theory.' 

'What's a gable?' Klaus asks, hoping to change the subject. 

It's easier to chew on one of the bright orange carrots in front of him than to get pulled into the argument. While Diego is distracted by the book Ben is waving in his face ( _The Yellow Wallpaper_ ), Klaus attempts to steal one of the carrots off his plate. He's rewarded with a corn kernel between his brows. 

His siblings start to learn that there's something out there they can't see, but most other people can. Fiction has often been ignored for non-fiction, but so long as it's in text form, it's not completely out of bounds. Over the course of the week, they devour as many titles as they can, trying to compare notes and decide what it all means. 

Klaus has never wanted to tell them more in his life. He sits cross-legged on a couch, a copy of _A Clockwork Orange_ on his life. He wants to point at his carrots and say, ' _this_! This is orange!'. He wants to grab a handful of Diego's hair and tell them that it's black. He wants to run up to Mom and show them her skirt and tell them it's pink. 

He doesn't, though. He sits with a hand over his mouth, squeezing his carrots and gritting his teeth. He can't tell them. He's not allowed. 

It's Allison who finally faces down their father. With their books in hand, she marches up to him at dinner time and drops them on the table. 

'What is green?' she asks. 

Klaus is about to ask what a gable is, too, but Diego punches him in the arm and he shuts his mouth. 

Their education isn't lacking. Their father is thorough. He just happens to be selective about what he thought was pertinent. Current political leaders, reproductive health and botanical designation is high on his agenda, while things like colour, music theory and the French revolution is low. All of them, comparatively, could dance a mean foxtrot. 

Mom is hovering nearby, serving potatoes and collards and roast chicken breast. Klaus would rather they all sit down and begin eating. For a moment, it actually seems like the subject might be dropped and they can all go back to musing about what green may or may not be. Reginald rarely lectures at the dining table. 

Such a reprieve isn't given that day. 

With the books spread out around him, Reginald begins to talk about colour. What it is, what it means. He rolls his eyes at the phrase _soulmates_ , and at the idea of there only ever being one person in several billion for each individual on the planet. But, he begrudgingly admits after a moment, that there is a link between certain intense periods with people and a heightened emotional arousal that causes a change in biological functions. The ability to see colour is linked with that. 

Klaus watches his siblings. He forces himself to copy their responses. He nods with Ben, he grips his fork like Luther. He looks down at the table when Diego does. 

None of it explains why he's always been able to see colour. Infants are incapable of feeling love, of achieving such a deep and sacred bond that Reginald describes. He's not even sure if an infant can even identify a _soulmate_. It's a horrendously romantic ideal, though, and one that makes Klaus wonder if he had met his soulmate some thirteen years ago. 

Maybe he had. Maybe they're back in the country he had been born in, and is as lost to the ages as his birth certificate and mother's name. 

'Are you able to see colour?' Vanya asks quietly. 

There's a pause. Then Reginald says the same thing he always does when one of them asks a question outside of his planned curriculum: 

'Irrelevant.' 

Mom begins to collect the books. She takes the copy of _Surrender the Pink_ that Klaus is holding and offers him a smile. She's wearing _Fire and Ice_ lipstick again. 

'Will any of us ever see colour?' Ben asks quietly. 

There's another pause. Reginald stares at him, studies him. Klaus glances up cautiously; Diego is looking over the table at him, and they both cast their eyes to where Ben is sitting. 

'No. I suppose you won't,' Reginald says, before slicing into his chicken. 

That is the most the siblings learn from Reginald about the world of colour. 

* 

Later, when his body has been cremated and scattered to the wind, Ben wakes Klaus up in the middle of the night. 

'It's so beautiful, Klaus. It's so beautiful.' 

'I know, I know. Garlic bread really is beautiful.' 

'No, _trees_ ,' Ben insists, waving his hands. ' _Green_. I know what green is, Klaus. There's so much of it. There's so many different types. Trees and apples and grass, they're all green, but different types. Do you know some languages use green and blue to mean the same thing? It's so wild, they're completely different!' 

Klaus lays there, watching Ben stand on the bed as he tries to describe it. He points to the different shades of blue on Klaus' duvet, the cream on the carpet and walls, even the different types of black in his wardrobe. Blinking slowly, trying to clear the sleep from his eyes, Klaus hunches over and watches Ben shiver with excitement. 

'I know,' he says around a yawn as Ben starts to go on about how bright orange is. 'I know, Ben.' 

'Yeah, but it's _orange_.' 

'I _know_ ,' Klaus says again, a little more insistently. 'I can see it.' 

That makes Ben pause. He looks at Klaus, looks around, and then back at him. 

'Since when?' he asks, his voice tinted with accusation. 

'Since... forever. Since I can remember. All my life.' 

Ben is astounded. There's a moment where he looks like he wants to fight Klaus; his fists balls up, the way he used to do when he was young and alive and would huff about the injustice of their situation. And then his shoulders sag and he muses as he sits down on the bed beside Klaus about whether his ability to see colour is due to his connection with the dead. 

Although he has no proof to suggest otherwise, Klaus doesn't think so. When he's in communication with the dead, there's a tingle to it. It's like when he stands too close to an old CRT TV that's just been switched off. He can feel a buzz like electricity. It makes his hair stand on end and a shiver run down his spine. 

Seeing colour isn't like that. It just _is_ , as natural to him as the wind or sunshine. 

He disappoints Ben when he says he doesn't know if any of their other siblings can see colour. He doesn't think they can, though. Some of their clothing combinations are fairly horrendous (Allison went through a phase between fourteen and sixteen of matching bright red with baby pink, and Luther has a mustard yellow shirt he insists on wearing a lot) and others (like Diego and Vanya) seem uninterested in finding out more about it. 

'I guess Dad was wrong,' Ben says to himself. 'If this is what happens when we die, then we'll all see colour eventually.' 

Klaus pauses and wraps a loose thread from his pyjama bottoms around his finger. 

'Is it really bad?' he finally asks. 'Being dead?' 

Considering it, Ben shrugs. 'I had a really big craving for a cheeseburger the morning before I died.' 

'And now?' 

'I still have a really big craving for a cheeseburger.' 

The question had been more an attempt for Klaus to avoid considering Ben's query than anything else. It's impossible that any of their siblings would be able to see colour- wasn't it? Klaus feels he would know by now. But, in that sense, he supposes none of them really know he can see it. It's a piece of information he's kept close to his chest, smothered down low. 

He wants them to find out, he _does_. And he wants to know if any of them can see colour, too, so they can gossip over the beautiful world. 

He lays traps and tests. He wears clashing colours in hideous hues; lime green shorts with Hawaiian print shirts. He colours his nails red and orange and purple and blue. He paints his lips in _Fire and Ice_. 

No one comments, except for Diego who rolls his eyes across the breakfast table as Klaus smears the lipstick over his chin while trying to eat his Rice Krispies. 

'You know Dad'll kill you if that wear in front of him.' 

'You know Dad'll kill you if you keep carving “fuck you dad” into the kitchen table.' 

Eventually Allison moves out, and then Diego. Vanya is next, and Klaus is left by himself with Luther in the big house and endless hallways and empty rooms. He comes home high and drunk for the seventh time in a month and he finds the locks changed. Mom gives him his suitcases and Pogo gives him some money for a cab with an address for a short-term shelter. An apology is uttered by only one of them. He leaves with the cash, one suitcase and twin red lipstick stains on his cheeks. A tube of lipstick is slipped into his pocket as he leaves the stoop for the last time. 

Drugs always make the colours brighter, anyway. 

* 

He misses his family. Klaus has never been good on his own, and living separated from them leaves him feeling broken. He wanders the countryside, buzzed and stoned and heart heavy. Sometimes Ben is there, and other times he wanders off, doing whatever it is that ghosts do. Klaus is never quite sure what it is; Ben explains that Klaus is like a lighthouse, a beacon, and that's what attracts the ghosts. 

As the months pass, everything begins to feel a little off. Klaus isn't able to tell what is different at first. His hangovers make everything fuzzy at the edges, while the booze effects his judgement. It's not until he starts wandering back east closer to his home town a good year later (and a few pissed off dealers to boot) that he realises what's been wrong. 

The colours have been muted. They're not completely gone, but they have faded, as though someone has turned the saturation down. 

As the Greyhound drops him off in the city centre, his vision is filled with rich greys, deep blues, lush browns. He never thought he'd miss this godforsaken city, but as he walks the streets he grew up on, he realises how much he had. The colours he has been losing for the past year fill him with a sense of glee. He barely has time to wonder how or why the colours had disappeared. 

As far as he knows, Diego still lives somewhere in this town. Vanya, too, had never quite left, though Klaus thinks she travelled a little with some string quartet within the tri-state area. Luther's mailing address is still the Academy, even though he's on the moon. 

Isn't that a laugh. Luther lives on the _moon_. Serves him right. 

With Luther on the moon ( _ha_!) and Vanya out of town, Klaus does his best to catch up with the rest of his available family. His father won't let him in the house, but Mom leaves him a parcel of sandwiches, cookies and a tube of lipstick at the gate. 

It's not until his last night in town that Diego finally catches up with him. Klaus isn't sure why it's taken them so long to catch up. Diego offers some reasons, but Klaus is still partly faded from what he smoked a few hours ago and he only briefly hears the words _police academy_. 

'That's a good movie.' 

'What?' 

Klaus just smiles. 

The colours are bright. He's high as a fucking kite, he _knows_ he's high, but the colours are bright today. He slumps against the cafe table and smiles at Diego and stirs the milkshake in front of him with a straw. It's a soft green, spearmint flavoured, with a bright red strawberry hanging on the rim of the glass. The straw is orange, and a large scoop of vanilla ice cream is bobbing in the middle. He wishes Diego could see the colours. 

'I've missed you,' Diego says. 

Klaus replies, 'I bet you have.' 

He's missed Diego, too. 

It's easier to joke around and keep his remarks to a short quip than to admit just how much he's missed Diego. Out of all his siblings (those still alive and in this plane of existence), Klaus has always been the closest with Diego. They still bicker and snap and quibble at one another, but Diego sees him and his flaws and he doesn't want to erase them. Sure, he wants to elevate him to a more sober version, but he doesn't try to mask who Klaus is, like the others might. 

'Are you sticking around?' Diego asks later. 

Rain is rolling in from the coast, bringing with it a wave of fog. It makes the neon lights surrounding them shimmer and twist. The pinks and blues are horrendously obnoxious, and Klaus has half a mind to steal one of them, just to hang it up in his inevitable shitty, low-priced apartment that he's going to be renting when he next plants his roots. It could server as a reminder of this night. 

Diego is illuminated by a dirty orange sign, which catches on the golden buttons of his coat. 

Down the road, Ben is watching from the mouth of an alley. His hood is pulled up, and Klaus suddenly realises how cold it is. Wrapping his arms around himself, he shivers just as lightning fills the sky and a crack high above signals the incoming storm. Rain hits hard without warning and Klaus is drenched in seconds. 

'Jesus, here,' Diego huffs as Klaus stands there, horribly under-dressed for the weather. 

Pulling off his coat, he drapes it over Klaus' shoulders, ignoring his half-hearted arguments. 

'You're going to freeze to death one of these days,' he continues to chide as Klaus pulls the jacket closed. 

'And you'll get shot,' Klaus replies. 

'Just don't die before me, okay?' 

Klaus keeps the coat on as he walks home and collects his few belongings. It smells of Diego. He's still high as balls, but he's sure if he concentrates, the colours seem brighter as he burrows down into it. He wears it on the Greyhound that takes him out of the city, across the country, and uses it as a blanket during the nights when he doesn't yet have enough money to yet buy a bed. The golden buttons tarnish and the black wool becomes grey with dirt and age. 

The colours grow dim. Day by day, his world becomes more drab. It's as though someone has turned down the opacity on the world. Like the concrete blocks around him, his world becomes a world of muted tones, as though everything has been dipped in grey. Sometimes, when he's on the cusp of waking up, he pulls the coat close and he's sure he can see the colours bloom into saturation like they used to be. 

The jacket is stolen a year later, when his apartment is broken in twice in the space of a week over an unpaid debt. Klaus misses it more than the tooth that was knocked loose. 

* 

He returns home. 

The colours return. 

Allison's hair is blonde. Luther is far more pale than Klaus remembers, and Vanya looks a little sickly. Five's eyes are more blue than how the artist painted them. Diego no longer wears his gold hoops, and Klaus misses them. Reginald's ashes are a chalky grey, Grace still wears pink and Pogo's fur is tinged with white. 

And then, and then, and then: 

Vietnam is hot. Everything is tinged with a slight yellow hue. Maybe it's the sun, the typhoons or the chemicals in the air, the kind that cloy in clubs and bars. 

Or, maybe, it's because he's been pulled from time and his reason for seeing colour is in his past or the world's future. Klaus doesn't know. 

Dave's eyes are blue. Klaus spends more time than he cares to admit staring at them. His thumb runs under them, his nails skimming his eyelashes. His hair is a wheat blonde, his complexion warm and cheeks pink. The army camo does absolutely nothing for him, but somehow he makes it work. Klaus wishes he could take him home with him, but he doesn't know how to; he's not sure if time travel works that way. 

'Has anyone told you that when the sun hits your hair, it's slightly red?' 

Pausing, the midday sun streaming through the dirty barrack window, Klaus studies him. Their lunch is vile, and he misses Grace's cooking. 

'How do you know what red is?' Klaus asks suspiciously. 

A curious, cold feeling washes through him. He looks at Dave, looks at the bottle of ketchup on the table, looks at the scabbed wounds covering his hands from the latest march through the forest. Red is the colour of passion, of heightened emotion, whether it be positive or negative. 

'How do _you_?' Dave shoots at him. 'I've seen you matching your nail polish to the uniform.' 

They talk. 

Dave has someone back home. They can't be together, they both know that. But, maybe, when Dave's tour is up (and so long as his love's number isn't called), they'll try to move somewhere together. They're both farmboys. Dave is dairy, _he_ is grain. Maybe if they go out far enough, somewhere isolated enough, no one will think twice. Apparently _he_ knows a couple of girls who are in a similar situation. A two-bedroom house, maybe a converted barn, no one will be none the wiser. There's no doubt in any of their collective minds that Dave will come home from the war, but just in case... 

Just in case, it's good to have someone to hold onto at night. Dave knows _he_ has someone at home, too, to clutch onto when the news reports are read and the causalities listed. 

He asks about Klaus. He can only shrug and say he's always been like this. Maybe he's a genetic anomaly (in more ways than one). 

'I don't think it works like that, Klaus. There's someone. You'll see them again. The colours will be brighter when you meet them again.' 

Klaus can't argue with him, because he has nothing to suggest otherwise. 

* 

Blood is red. It stains and gets everywhere. 

He washes his hair over and over. 

For the first time, he sees the red in it. 

* 

Colour returns in full. As though a tinted screen has been lifted from his eyes, Klaus drinks in the variety of hues of his home timeline. The sky, the trees, even the dirt in the ground. He's missed it, despite all he's lost, despite everything that had been given and flung away from him. 

He tries to focus on the good things, the better things. 

Vanya is white and Ben is blue. 

Luther wears green. Allison wears a magenta dress. 

Someone bought Five a purple sweater. 

Grace wears turquoise for the first time, and Pogo's fur becomes more speckled with grey. 

Diego's gold hoop returns. 

And, as the days turn into weeks, and finally months, it becomes a little easier. The damage to the house is fixed and rooms are rebuilt. Klaus has a room again, with a roof and a blanket and a window that can be fully shut. There's an old ache in his chest, as he watches his siblings come and go. 

Allison is the first to leave, just like the first time round, and this time she takes Luther to meet Claire. 

Vanya has always remained close to their childhood home, but one day she's just gone and Klaus later spots her in a supermarket buying under-ripe bananas. 

Five comes and goes, acknowledging Klaus with a grunt as he steals away into the night. 

Diego returns erratically. It's never clear if he's sleeping overnight, or if he's only paying Mom a visit. 

Ben's ghost continues to haunt him, and sometimes he can be seen jumping in front of Pogo in an attempt to spook him. 

'I'm still unconvinced he can't see me,' he tells Klaus later. 'He knows more than he lets on.' 

His sleepless nights begin to grow fewer and farther between. The bouts of anxiety that sometimes hit in the shower grow smaller. The smell of blood leaves his nose, the dirt from under his nails is picked clean. Dave is never very far from his mind, but the pain of his memory begins to trickle away. He wonders if he ought to go looking for an isolated dairy-grain farm, if he should even open a door for someone that's likely been shut for forty-odd years. 

A tube of _Fire and Ice_ continues to follow him everywhere. He can't bring himself to wear it anymore, but he likes to wind the tube up and down and reminisce on simpler times. He shoves it up the sleeve of his orange sweater, tucking it away from view. 

He's picking sugar-coated candies from a bag. They're a myriad of colours- blue and yellow, green and red, orange, pink and purple. He has no interest in eating them. He's just pushing them into different colour-coordinated groups. Yellow with yellow, purple with purple, like with like. 

Footsteps have him stopping and lifting his head. Diego is at the end of the table, a damaged holster hanging over his arm. He drops it on the table as he eyeballs the collection of candies and lifts his chin at Klaus. 

'What the hell are you doing?' 

'Nothing,' Klaus replies, because he isn't doing anything. Not really. 

Doubtfully, Diego rounds the table. Looking at the collection of candies, he reaches into the bag, pulls a few out, and shoves them in his mouth. As he's crunching away, Klaus watches as he rests his finger on a green candy that's in the middle of a pack of oranges. Slowly, Diego drags it across the table, and brings it home with its fellow green friends. Staring at the pile as Diego lifts his finger, Klaus carefully tracks his eyes up. 

Diego is watching him, his expression unreadable. 

'How do you know what green is?' Klaus asks. 

'Do you even know what a gable is?' Diego replies. 

Klaus uncrosses his legs and drops them to the kitchen floor. Diego still watches him. 

'Who taught you to see colour?' Klaus says slowly. 

'Who taught you?' 

There's a pause. Klaus waits. 

'Dave?' Diego suggests. 

Klaus shakes his head. 'Long before.' 

'Me, too.' 

There's another pause. Klaus swallows and rests his finger on the green candy. He drags it back and forth, then finally lets it come to rest in front of him. Diego pulls out a chair beside him and sits down, his hand laying flat on the table. 

'I can't ever remember not seeing colour,' Klaus finally says. 'Though sometimes it grows dim and it fades.' 

'When?' 

'When I moved away. When I travelled. When I went- during the war.' 

'Huh,' Diego says, as though Klaus has made a remark about the weather. Then, after a beat, 'me, too.' 

'I like pink,' Klaus admits. 

'I figured you would.' 

Klaus looks up. Diego is staring at him, a look of quiet wonderment on his face. He lifts his hand and lays it upon Klaus' own, trapping the candy under his palm. He can feel the tube of lipstick pressing into his wrist, a reminder of the secret he promised to keep as a child. 

In time with his pulse, the colours in the kitchen pulse. The brightness of the candy is astounding. There's a hint of gold in Diego's eyes that Klaus has never seen before. A flush in his cheeks, just under his tanned and slightly freckled skin. 

There's a nervous, uncertain shift, before Diego leans in. He has enough time to take a breath, before Diego closes the gap and kisses him. 

Fireworks burst behind his eyelids, an array of colours that he's sure he's never seen before. And, when he opens his eyes, everything is a little brighter, and everything makes a little more sense. 


End file.
